X-Rated!: The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture

Sounds like an interesting book, and the research isn't too bad. Looking at the semiotics of "profane" culture - and it's cathartic value - seems a rich field for exploration.

Book explores the lure of the X-rated

DAVID COOPER/TORONTO STAR

A dancer takes the pole position at Caddy's Strip Club on Eglinton Ave. E. The number of strippers in Toronto has dropped by 50 per cent in 10 years.

In some measure all pop culture represents the triumph of the pleasure instinct over the Puritan one. From singing to striptease, transgressions are us – and our safety valve

Nov 16, 2008 04:30 AM

Kenneth Kidd
Feature Writer

Marcel Danesi is nursing his Stella Artois as a young woman slowly descends the stairs that lead to the stage, the one with the gleaming brass poles. She's wearing skyscraping stilettos, black nylons, a garter belt, panties and a shimmering camisole.

Back in the 1960s, when Danesi was putting himself through graduate school by playing piano at the old Victory Burlesque on Spadina Ave., the young woman's current state of undress would have been just about the end of the show. Now it's merely the beginning.

She dances on stage to one song, then starts undressing during a second, more languorous tune, and by the end of the third song, she's completely naked – which is, curiously, the least interesting part of the performance.

All mystery, fantasy and anticipation have disappeared, leaving only, as Danesi remarks, "the denouement."

Danesi – a semiotics professor at the University of Toronto whose books include Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence – has come to this downtown strip club with a mix of reluctance and curiosity, a natural dilemma for someone who considers himself a moral man but decidedly not a moralistic one, judging, dictating, full of disdain.

Yet the visit seems a fitting punctuation mark, both for Danesi's personal narrative and the topic of his forthcoming book, X-Rated!: The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture.

His father was a comic doing Italian vaudeville in Toronto, and Danesi the boy often joined the act, playing accordion. A pretty straight line runs from vaudeville through burlesque to strip clubs.

The new book, meanwhile, is Danesi's attempt to answer a question once posed by a student, a query he vividly remembers precisely because he didn't have a prefabricated response.

The question was this: "If pop culture is so crass and vulgar, why hasn't it disappeared? Is it because we secretly love vulgarity?"

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Tags: X-Rated!, Mythic Symbolism, Popular Culture, Marcel Danesi, semiotics, meaning, Philosophy, culture, symbolism, transgressions, the sacred, profane, catharsis